RC Swampboat Repair

I didn't even look to see what the original model looked like until today.

Apparently there was this elaborate propeller cage... I wonder what that was for?

And there was a simple bracket that attached to it. Who knew?

Safety, bah. Simplicity, double bah.

Next repair is that gaping hole in the front deck. Used to stash the battery, its a bit of an eyesore. Plus because of the massive torque of this motor, it is rolling (and therefore drag-steering) to one side.

Counter-rotating motors is one option. What could be better than one hugely overpowered motor, except TWO hugely overpowered motors?

Counter-weight is the other option and the one I will tackle in this project for now.

I am planning a foam swampboat build that will be a bunch bigger than this one; I will try the counter-rotational coaxial build on it...

A friend suggested a removable counterweight in which I could store the battery too. Maybe a 3D printed crate would work. Maybe something like

with some built in attachment thingy...

In order to build a replacement brace for this bad boy, I needed some measurements.

The hypotenuse of the triangle made by the drop between the vane tops and the motor mount arch was the first angle to consider. Rather than using math, I made a coarse model in Sketchup modelling the vane height from the deck, the distance from the vane root to directly below the attachment point on the motor mount arch and the height of motor mount arch attachment point from the deck.

Copy that, put it the appropriate distance away from the original and you have your basic framework upon which to design your replacement brace.

I took a .bmp of a skull I had made many years ago and extruded a 3d model to throw on the bracing just for fun.

Some of my angles were just a tad off. I gently heated the printed brace and bent the existing angles to perfection (heh). Screwed it down, slapped on the new EQ and blew away... well everything. First run blew all the papers and loose tools off my workbench.

The worst thing about this fix and upgrade was finding a large enough body of water to get it up to full speed!! If I added ailerons, this would literally fly.

This was fun enough to try to build my own from scratch, entirely 3d printed.